Nov. 10, 2011 - The idea of cowboy poetry as opposed to simply poetry, comes from the fact that cowboy poetry is written by cowboys for cowboys. As a sub-genre, it's stuck around since a Texan named Lysius Gough published a book titled "Western Trails and Other Rhymes" in 1886. That book is generally considered the first book of cowboy poetry and Gough is recognized as the first cowboy poet.
Gough, born in Lamar County in 1862, was well-qualified as a cowboy well before his 21st birthday, but he was barely literate when he ran away from home at age 14, due to what has been described as "a minor family incident." He found work herding cattle from northwest Texas to New Mexico, Reno and Kansas for B.L. Murphy in Hopkins and Hunt counties. His experiences during those five years provided him with the raw material for much of his poetry, which he began to scribble down as he was able.
When he was 20, some men in a buggy approached him in Montague County and asked if he wanted to take one of their horses to Red River Station. Gough obliged the men and was asked by one of them, Jules Gunter, if he wanted to accompany a whole herd of horses to the T-Anchor Ranch in the Texas Panhandle. Gunter's family owned the T-Anchor, which had holdings in Grayson County, as well as the Panhandle.
Gough took Gunter up on his offer and stayed on at the T-Anchor for two years, until a chuckwagon cook named Gus 'Parson' Lee gave him some good advice, which Gough heeded. (The other cowboys called Gough 'Parson' because he never swore). "Do you know you are a damn fool? You have no school education and if you go back to the ranch you never will have. My advice to you is to go home and go to school."
Gough was 22, but he enrolled at Pilot Point Institute. The 10 and 12 year olds that he attended school with must have wondered why any grown man would quit his job as a cowboy to attend elementary school. After he graduated, Gough was named the school's principal and why not? He was already a published poet, having published "Western Travels and Other Rhymes" while he was still in grade school. Ever restless, he also studied law and moved his growing family to the Panhandle during the early days of that region's settlement.
In addition to being the country's first published cowboy poet, Gough was also the first school teacher and the first county judge in Castro County and the first mayor of Dimmit. He performed some of the first experiments in the Panhandle with various strains of crops and seeds; his reports are archived in the Panhandle Plain Historical Museum in Canyon. He later operated a large wheat farm in Deaf Smith County and was the first president of the Panhandle Wheat Growers Association.
In that role, he studied how the grain exchange operated in relation to how much he and other wheat farmers got paid and he didn't like what he found. He published a book called "Crime" which denounced in no uncertain terms the speculators he charged with manipulating the grain market to the benefit of the speculators and at the expense of the farmer.
"When strawberries grow on poison ivy and cows sit erect on cacti and sing 'Home Sweet Home' the farmer will come into his own by borrowing more money," Gough wrote.
Gough helped organize a reunion of T-Anchor cowboys at a park near Hereford in 1922. Gus Lee, the cook who advised Gough to go back to grade school as a 22-year old, was on hand to make sourdough biscuits for the boys, who reminisced and listened as Gough recited his poems as he had so many times so many years ago on so many round-ups. The reunion became an annual affair.
Gough published a second volume of poetry, "Spurs, Jingles and Saddle Songs" in 1935, which contained several poems from the first book along with some new material. He kept writing until the day he died, Nov. 4, 1940, in Amarillo. A poem found in its typewriter was titled, appropriately, "Gone." Indeed, Gough was gone, and so was the way of life he wrote about, but the cowboy poetry he pioneered has endured.
